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Let’s salute Jocelyn Alice’s giggle with a relieved laugh: Menon

The next time Major League Baseball makes changes to the All-Star Game, it might consider just piping in a recorded version of “O Canada.”

Forget the live performance.

No good can come from the live performance.

Apparently, the baseball gods are now determined to turn any live performance of our national anthem into a national disgrace.

Just ask singer Jocelyn Alice. On Tuesday night, while behind the mic at Marlins Park in Miami and soaking up the biggest spotlight of her fledgling career, Alice was charged with a singing error after she let out an audible giggle in between the lyrics, “God keep our land” and “glorious and free.”

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Why did she laugh? I’m not sure. Maybe she’s an atheist who finds the concept of divine protection to be an absurd betrayal of her beliefs. Maybe she thinks freedom is hilarious. Or maybe she caught the expressions of some players who started to react to her rendition of “O Canada” the way toddlers react to cough syrup.

Was Blue Jay Justin Smoak giving Canadian Jocelyn Alice a death stare over her singing of the national anthem? No, writes Vinay Menon: Smoak always looks like that. (GRADY SAS/TWITTER)

As Alice sang, folding her arms into her chest, overemoting and under-delivering on little things like time, pitch and about 80 per cent of the high notes, Canadian slugger Joey Votto raised his eyebrows and did one of those abrupt headshakes that roughly translates into, “Mommy, this tastes horrible.”

Jays closer Roberto Osuna somehow looked both confused and bored, like he was suddenly locked in the bullpen with a talking iguana that was inexplicably reciting the latest terms and conditions from the iTunes store.

Then there was the reaction of Osuna’s teammate, Justin Smoak, which in turn sparked a grand slam of speculation on social media and in the news on Wednesday.

Did Smoak shoot poor Alice a death stare after she giggled? As a rep for the only Canadian team in the league, as an honorary and beloved Torontonian, did Justin take personal offence at this possible show of disrespect? Did he fear too much more of her singing might land him on the 15-day disabled list with cochlear strain?

Personally, I didn’t think Smoak looked peeved. That death stare? Yeah, that’s just his resting face. Whether he’s standing at first base or sitting on the bench or wobbling in the batter’s box before launching a 450-foot moon shot of a home run, that’s how Justin Smoak always looks.

He probably has daggers shooting out of his retinas while grilling catfish. He probably glowers in the shower and scowls in the pool.

There’s a reason his nickname is not Chuckles.

No, the real story here — and it’s a feel-good story — is that we live in a country that can still get hot and bothered about a nervous laugh in the middle of our national anthem during an all-star game in a sport that has only one Canadian team.

And you know what? Even these scandals are getting gentler with time.

I mean, Gigglegate has got nothing on last year’s “O Canada” controversy, when that tenor went rogue and altered the lyrics to make a political statement about how all lives matter.

That lone wolf was the Donald Trump Jr. of national anthem singers.

But here’s the thing: it’s the rest of the world that is keeping me up at night.

It’s the rest of the world that is driving me to drink. It’s the rest of the world where social unrest is booming and politics is beyond toxic and lives are shattered and an iceberg the size of Prince Edward Island just broke off Antarctica.

The rest of the world is a mess and getting messier by the day.

But here in Canada, we are debating a giggle — a giggle — in our national anthem. The real horrors are sufficiently far enough away to allow us such a sweet diversion. As other countries are imploding, we are torching a singer. I mean, how lucky are we to live in a country that is so great that even the brawls are pizza-related?

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